The BBC say there could be sunny spells soon, but from the look of the sky it seems that The Met Office may come closer to reality. At the moment I would say that the sky is light grey instead of white.  Sunny spells may happen later, and 19 or 20° C is forecast for late afternoon. Tomorrow will probably be mostly dull, and rain might fall for a few hours in the early evening. 18° C is forecast by The Met Office and just 17° C by the BBC, which also throws in a lot more rain, and earlier in the afternoon.
 
   It's a very early start this morning because I want to be showered and dressed soon after 8am, but I reckon I have just over an hour to write up a few notes about yesterday, last night, and this morning. The entire thing can be read on my complete archived page for today if you don't read it on my "today" page (which is where I am writing it before archiving it.

  I am unsure if yesterday was a good, bad, or mostly indifferent day. Although I thought I would be doing the full shave, shampoo, and shower this morning, I soon decided I should do it all yesterday when there was no rush. I just need a shower this morning so I am presentable when I go to my appointment with the cardiologist. After my shower I put all, barring some bed linen, laundry in to soak.

  I didn't really rush to finish that laundry. Only with hindsight did I realise that if I had hung it all on the washing line, the day would be mostly dry, and by late afternoon it could have all been dry, or at least dry enough to bring indoors to air. Before I had even finished drying my hair I had a phone call from Sue. She had done a disappearing act, and had not been seen or heard of since last Wednesday. It turned out that she had eaten a rotten prawn (probably) and had several days of the galloping shits !

  That phone call, typically for Sue, went on for over 2 hours. When I called a halt, and said goodbye, I had a bit of a rest before doing all the rinsing and wringing out of the laundry before hanging it on the clothes horse to dry overnight (aided by a desk fan blowing at it). It did include a bit of bed linen - just two pillow cases. I might wash the fitted sheet, and dry that indoors if we don't get a warm sunny day soon, but the duvet cover definitely needs to dry outside on the washing line.

  I think it was probably before finishing the laundry when I had some lunch, but I wonder if it was the other way around. I stuck to my guns, and had a sort of healthy lunch. It was two small apples, a small, easy peelable, orange, and a chunk of double Gloucestershire cheese. The cheese nicely balances the sharpness of the apple, and to my surprise it almost went with the orange.

  Some of my afternoon was spent looking through the original, unedited, pictures I had taken at Jo Courteen's birthday party in 2018. I was looking for pictures of the band Run For Cover, aka Glamstar, and in particular, pictures where I could cut out each band member, and edit the picture as a portrait. In those days my camera for important occasions was my Canon 1200D. It was a good camera, but not an excellent camera such as the Nikon D610 I now use for the most important stuff. The five pictures I worked on were not great, but all were good enough for some portraits.

  While I was photo editing I got the munchies, and ate an awful lot of some spicy corn puff type things. The sugar content was a bit high per 100gm, but I think the whole, big bag, only had about 60gm in it, and I ended up eating maybe less than half the full pack. Probably the worst thing about them was their salt content. That, and a sort of mustard taste, made them very moorish, and difficult to put down.

  One other thing I did yesterday afternoon was to order some more stuff from Amazon. One item was a pack of Duracell "Optimum" AAA cells. I had meant to order these last time, but ordered AA cells instead. The AAA cells are for my wrist mounted blood pressure meter. I am sure it is faulty because it seems to eat batteries. I also ordered another cheap wrist mounted blood pressure monitor to see how it compares, both in readings, and battery life with the existing meter.

  My dinner, eaten while watching a bit of TV last night, was a tomato and mozzarella salad - one of Tesco's ready made salads. It was quite tasty, but the nutritional panel said it's sugar content was a bit high - probably from the sun dried tomatoes in it. I'm sure I had something before or after dinner, and it may have been a palmful (less than a handful) of salted peanuts.

  The TV I watched last night was an episode of The Simpsons, and an episode of Secrets Of The London Underground. The latter is currently all repeats, and some are feeling a bit boring. I still "need" to see it to make sure it is not the first programme of the reported fourth series. It finished at 8pm, and I turned off the TV, and spent the next hour or two either pottering around, or reading in bed.

  I hoped to be in bed, and asleep early last night because I wanted to be up early this morning (which I have managed to do).  The only thing about last night was that with no heating on at all yesterday, which was not a warm day, it was getting a bit cool when I was trying to sleep. It is possible I was asleep by 9pm, but I woke up an hour, maybe two, later with the duvet over me, and a wet with sweat pillow under my head.

  I turned the heater on low, and it struggled to get my bedroom warm enough to completely discard the duvet until at least 4am. Even then it still felt a bit cool unless I kept at least a leg under the duvet. Despite all that I did seem to sleep OK last night, although it wasn't deep and dreamless sleep. I had at least one dream that seemed to go on and on, but it is easy for me to see it was a long series of short dreams set in the same place, but with little continuity between each short dream.

  The dream(s) was set in a sort of mix between hotel/hostel, training college, and maybe also work location, but it was probably supposed to be a work owned and run training school, that also had bedrooms. I don't recall any lectures, but most rooms seemed to have examples of old telephone exchange stuff. Even what seemed to be my bedroom had a workbench in it. One notable bit of dream involved being with a colleague, and opening a cupboard in the bedroom. Inside, among other stuff, was a doubled, for extra strength, black carrier bag with rolled up lengths of what I knew to be very good quality coaxial cable.

  I said to my colleague "wow" and went on to say that I remember stashing that bag in the cupboard 5 years ago, the last time I had been there, and it had been my intention to quietly walk out with it and use the cable for my own purposes. I think I was still going to "borrow" (!!!) it, but I don't know if I did because I woke up before any more happened.

  It was 5.50am when I woke up, and decided to get up. It was nice and early, as intended....or maybe half an hour earlier than really intended. I was fortunate that before I had drunk, or eaten anything, I was able to go to the toilet for both a pee and poo. Upon returning to my bedroom I got on the scales. I know that very small changes are not really worthy of celebration, but I was still happy to see the scales saying I was 100gm lighter then yesterday morning.

  I hoped that might lead to a nice low blood glucose reading. sadly it didn't. If anything my blood glucose was a little higher lower this morning, but not by much. The average of all three meters yesterday was 8.67mmol/l, and that was a bit higher than desired. This morning the average was 8.37mmol/l, and at least that is just under my old average of 8.5mmol/l, but that old average was getting closer to my new, self imposed target of 7.5mmol/l.

  This morning my blood pressure reading was 122/50. That is slightly higher than most mornings, but still only a bit over the "optimum" range, and in the lower end of the "normal" range. This has extra significance this morning when I have my appointment with the cardiologist early this morning. I even took a picture of the reading to prove to them what my blood pressure can be like when semi relaxed. If they take it at the appointment, "white coat syndrome" is bound to get it a lot higher.

  In further support of my blood pressure readings, I used one of my couple of spare packs of mega expensive printer inks to print out a clean copy of my last three months of twice a day, blood pressure readings. I now need to think of other stuff it would be useful to print before those new print cartridges dry up in a month or two.

 One bother today is that the order I placed with Amazon, just yesterday afternoon, sure in the knowledge it would probably not be delivered until tomorrow at the very earliest, is apparently arriving today ! There is no chance it will come while I am at the hospital seeing the cardiologist, but it could arrive before I get back from The Jolly Farmers where I will be having my regular Wednesday lunchtime pint or two of Guinness. I am reasonably sure that Angela won't be going to the pub today because I think she is on holiday, and so I could go to the pub early, and leave early.
        







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